Beguiled (2 page)

“You were the one who killed the demon and claimed the Fae power.”

True. She had accidentally killed what had turned out to be a demon, and then for her trouble Maggie had been imbued with the Faery dust of the five slain Fae the demon had been carrying around. All of that power was still sizzling inside Maggie, causing changes she hadn’t even begun to deal with yet. Not to mention, when she had thrown Queen Mab out a window, Maggie had also been given Mab’s power. Maggie was now a raging tornado of Faery strength with not the slightest clue what that might mean for her in the future.

“That demon was eating my ex-boyfriend, remember? And then tried to chow down on
me
.” Just the memory of that day gave her chills. “And I didn’t mean to kill her, anyway, and believe me, if I knew then what I know now . . .”

“What?” He laughed shortly. “You would do something different? You would allow the demon to kill you instead?”

Well, he had her there. Damn it.

“Okay, no. I still would have done what I did, but then I would have given the power to Mab. She was such a bitch, she deserved to have to be Queen.” Remembering how she’d tossed Mab out the window, Maggie sort of regretted it now. Of course, if Mab were still around, then she’d be trying to kill Maggie, which would just be a whole
different
sort of problem, so what the hell? Guess it was better to be Queen than dead.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t have to paint windows, pay bills, buy groceries and you know . . . be a person.

Culhane blew out a frustrated breath. This, Maggie was used to. She got it a lot from Culhane and the nasty-ass pixie Bezel, who was still living in the oak tree in her backyard.

When
did her life turn into a paranormal soap opera?

“It is your destiny.”

“Right. Well, destiny can get in line,” Maggie snapped, stepping down off the ladder and walking to the array of paints she had lined up neatly against the building. Culhane was always pulling out the destiny card. “I’ve got sixteen more windows to do before Christmas, and in case you didn’t know, Thanksgiving was last week.” Maggie sighed in fond memory of the gluttonous feast she’d enjoyed, Faery guests and all. Well, Bezel hadn’t been much fun, but then he was a two-thousand-year-old pixie and lived in a tree, so what could you expect? “I’m barely over that. Plus, Christmas is getting closer all the time and I’m gonna have to do most of that, too, because Nora’s got some kind of weird flu, which I think your stupid Fae Warrior Quinn gave her.”

One more thing to think about, she told herself as she mixed red and blue tempera together to get a rich violet color. She added just enough water to thin the mixture and idly stirred while she considered how her family had been dragged into Maggie’s new adventures. Of course, Nora hadn’t been dragged so much as she had
leaped
into this strange new world. But then, Nora had always been drawn to the supernatural. Unlike Maggie, who preferred more “natural” and less “super.”

“The Fae do not get sick,” Culhane said, breaking her concentration.

“They’re just carriers?” Maggie frowned, picked up another brush, swirled it into the violet paint and stood up again, still frowning as purple tempera slid off the brush and down to her hand.

Her sister, Nora, had been sick for days and refused to go to a doctor—which was probably just as well, because she was having so much Faery sex lately that Quinn’s powers had started to affect her, and Nora kept floating at odd moments. How would they explain
that
to the doctor?

Add that to the list of worries, she thought. With Nora sick, her daughter, Eileen, had been spending more time with Maggie at the main house, because if Nora had some weird Faery plague, they didn’t want Eileen to get it. Which meant that Maggie was getting to listen to play-by-play descriptions of life in middle school and which boy was the cutest and which girl had it in for Eileen.

God, even thinking about what was going on in her life made her tired. “I sooo don’t have time to be Queen.”

“Time or not, you are the Queen, Maggie, and nothing can change that. You must come with me.”

Culhane grabbed her arm. The minute his hand touched her, Maggie felt a blast of heat that shot straight through her system and down to her core. Energized with expectation, her hormones did the little clog dance of happiness and started to make her ache with a need that she knew wasn’t going to get answered anytime soon.

Fabulous. Because what she really needed to make this day complete was to be so horny it hurt.

Carefully, she used her paint-smeared hand to pry his fingers off her arm. “God, Culhane, please do me a huge favor and go bug somebody else. I’m busy here.”

He ignored that. Big surprise. Glancing down at the violet paint on his fingers, he frowned, waved his other hand over them and the paint disappeared. Instantly. Maggie frowned and looked at her own hands. She’d be scrubbing for hours to get all the dried paint off her skin. She wasn’t completely Fae yet, though the change was definitely happening. Culhane had told her it was going to take some time for her to come into her full range of powers. But maybe she should take some time now to have him teach her a few more things.

The moment she considered it, she dismissed it. Normal. That’s what she wanted. A scrub brush and a hot shower were good enough for her. Scowling, she laid her brush against the glass and quickly painted a Christmas present into the snow scene; then, moving farther down the window, she painted another just beneath the Christmas tree she’d already sketched in.

“You must listen,” Culhane told her. “The banshee contingent is insisting on speaking with you.”

She sighed, set the violet paint down and dumped the brush into a can of rinse water; then she picked up the jar of red paint she’d already mixed and reached for a clean brush. Quickly, she layered in ribbons winding through the branches of the Christmas tree. Glancing at him, she asked, “Banshee have contingents? I thought they just went around screaming when people died.”

He smiled, and damn, that quick grin had a way of making her knees wobble. Good thing he didn’t do it very often.

“They do,” he told her. “The banshee are demanding a wider territory now. They’ve been in Ireland for millennia. They want to move to the New World.”

“The New World?” Maggie laughed and turned back to the glass, where she painted a frothy red ribbon at the base of a Christmas wreath. “Who’re you? Columbus? It’s not the New World, Culhane.”

“It is to us,” he muttered, throwing a quick glance up and down the street.

“Fine,” she said, grabbing the yellow paint and a fine-line brush to lay in candle flames. “Let ’em leave Ireland. What do I care?”

He reached out as if to grab her again, then noted the wet paint dotting her skin and rethought it. “Maggie, this is what I have been warning you about. You cannot make decisions so blithely. You must learn. The banshee cannot leave Ireland for here. If they do, it will create a war with the Cree-An.”

“The
who
?”

Grumbling under his breath, Culhane shook his hair back from his face and said, “The Cree-An have been haunting this ground for centuries. If the banshee invade, the war will spill into the world of human dreams, and the nightmares they cause will follow mortals into the waking.”

“Freaking nightmare faeries now?” Maggie groaned, and looked up and down the suddenly deserted street as if looking for an escape. She didn’t find one. Though for the first time, she wondered where everyone had gone. She didn’t even hear the low rumble of skateboard wheels on cement anymore. Weird.

“You just made my point about all of this, Culhane. I don’t know Otherworld. Don’t have a clue about the Fae.” And that was the bottom line, Maggie told herself.Why she couldn’t bring herself to be a queen. How could she be?

“I am willing to teach you,” he ground out in a tight, low tone.

“And that will take how long?” Maggie looked down into the red paint and stirred it so that it wouldn’t develop a dried-out skin across its surface. “You want me to sit on a throne and make decisions that affect not only
your
world, but mine, too. I can’t do it.”

“Maggie . . .”

She lifted her gaze to his, and staring into those pale green eyes, she finally managed to say, “What if I screw it up? What if what I do causes a war?” Hearing the words spoken aloud made her shake her head. “No way. I can’t risk it. And
you
shouldn’t want me to.”

Culhane moved closer and Maggie breathed in the clean, almost foresty scent of him. Did he
have
to smell so damn good? Wasn’t it enough that just looking at him could make the most stalwart feminist throw all of her ideals out the window and
beg
him to take her? Culhane was a walking, talking orgasm-in-waiting and being this close to him made Maggie’s hormones jangle so loud, her brain practically shut down.

“You are the destined Queen, Maggie,” he reminded her for the twelve thousandth time. “Your reign was foretold.”

She choked out a half laugh. She knew what he said was true. She felt drawn to Otherworld now. But that didn’t mean she was comfortable with her role. How could she be? Maggie hadn’t been raised to believe in the Fae. She’d always assumed her grandmother’s stories were just that. Stories. And even if she had believed, knowing about the Fae would not have prepared her to be their Queen.

Despite the gleam of confidence in Culhane’s eyes when he looked at her, Maggie was afraid she just wasn’t up to the challenge of what he expected her to be. Yes, she was a strong, independent woman. A woman of the twenty-first century, master of her fate, captain of her soul, owner of her own business. But that didn’t make her queen material, now, did it?

“I don’t suppose that prophecy of yours said how my ‘reign’ would turn out,” she said.

“No. Only that you would be Queen. The rest of your fate is up to you. You must write your future, as we all must.”

“Fabulous.”

He smiled, apparently guessing where her muddled thoughts were taking her. “We make our futures what we will, Maggie. Fate twists our paths and some things are immutable.” Culhane shrugged his wide shoulders. “Your destiny was to become Queen. It is up to you what you make of it.”

“But no pressure.”

“You will be a great queen, Maggie. You’ve the heart for it. The strength for it.” He lifted one hand to tuck a strand of dark auburn hair behind her slightly pointy ear. “We make our own destinies. We forge the future, one decision at a time.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she admitted.

“I am here with you, Maggie. We will work together.”

Yes, she thought, but he’d spent two hundred years at Queen Mab’s side, too. And what had that gotten the former queen? Deposed and thrown out a window into the void between dimensions, that’s what.

“Together? For how long?”

One corner of his amazing mouth tipped up and something inside her fisted. “For as long as we will it. The Fae are immortal, Maggie. And you are quickly becoming completely Fae. Soon your mortality will drop away.”

“Along with my humanity, huh?” She wrapped her arms around herself and scraped her paint-spattered hands up and down her arms to battle a sudden chill. “What if I don’t want to stop being human?”

“In that, you’ve no choice at all,” he told her, lifting his chin and looking down at her with the fierce, proud expression she’d come to know so well. “You will be Fae. You must accept it and your new duties.”

Maggie had already known that she had no way out. No way to backtrack and undo any of this. The only path open to her was the one that led straight ahead. Into unknown territory.

“Being Queen requires the art of compromise,” he told her briskly. “Start with this. I suggest you give the banshee England. The Cree-An do not like the British. They think them unimaginative and old-world.”

Maggie laughed shortly. “Faery prejudice?”

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Culhane said, moving in even closer to her, crowding Maggie enough that she could feel heat pouring off his body and reaching for hers.

“You say that,” she told him, taking a step back to put a little distance between herself and the delicious scent of Culhane. “But you really don’t get it. You can’t possibly. You’ve been alive for thousands of years, Culhane. I’m thirty. You’ve always been Fae. I’m human.”

“Not anymore.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You will learn, Maggie. You will be the queen destiny has named you.”

“What if I don’t want to be?” she countered. She held her breath and risked looking directly into his eyes again. Oh
God
, how could she be expected to think when he looked as he did? When his eyes locked with hers? When his scent surrounded her so she couldn’t think straight? Shaking her head, she muttered, “What if all I want is to be me, Maggie Donovan, failed artist and glass painter extraordinaire?”

His hands moved to cup her face, and Maggie felt that touch right down to the soles of her feet. Heat simmered and slid throughout her body like flames dancing on the surface of spilled gasoline. Oh, that wasn’t a good sign, she thought. Why did it have to be Culhane who could turn her into a puddle of needy goo? Why couldn’t she have fallen for a nice plumber? Why did it have to be a Fae Warrior who made her want to toss her panties into the air?

“You are so much more than
just
Maggie Donovan. It is in your blood, your heart, your very soul.” He bent his head and his breath brushed her cheek. “You are the one, Maggie. The only one—”

The one. The one for him? Or the one for Otherworld?

Which did he mean? And how would she ever know for sure?

At that moment, one corner of her mind whispered, did it matter? He was here. Right in front of her. Torturing her with his nearness, making her want things she knew she shouldn’t want. But maybe he was right, she thought as he drew nearer. Maybe she could do this. Maybe it was all meant to be. Otherworld. Him. Her.
Them.

Maybe . . . She leaned into him. Her eyes closed, her breath caught, her insides went into a flash burn and Maggie felt herself wanting to believe. Wanting to let herself . . .